domenica 6 marzo 2016

Luis Buñuel - Un
chien andalou

University of Swansea

academic year 2013/2014

Surrealism is an artistic and
literary movement which was officially born in France in 1924, with
an opera of André Breton when he published Manifested
surréaliste. Its maximum expansion was between the First and the
Second World War. In his opera, André Breton defined Surrealism as

[a] pure automatism which makes you express, both verbally and in any
other way, the real function of thoughts, without any kind of control
from reason and far away from moral or aesthetic concern.’ It’s
an evolution of Dadaism but it’s not the same. Dadaism has as an
important scope to eliminate all the ‘artistic restrictions,

surrealism instead tries to invert the idea; it attributes a role
which comes from our interiority, but without trying to ‘combat’
any restriction [Carboni 2010].
Surrealism wants to transform reality, but doesn’t wasn’t to deny
it. [Morante 2010] Important elements of the surrealist thought is the reconsideration
of the irrational part of human creativity and the will to express,
using art, everything what comes out directly from our subconscious.
Without all limits of human logic and restrictions imposed by
society, there will be a complete freedom of expression which
liberates our mind and stimulated our creativity. According to
Breton, Surrealism is a kind of ‘absolute reality’, where two
levels of wake (reason) and dream (unconscious) can find a superior
conciliation. Dream is the production of images during sleep and is
characterised by perceptions, images and emotions which appear
illogic. Surrealism depends upon the believability of most key
elements in the frame to highlight the element that doesn't quite fit
into the picture [Goto 1998].

Dalì
participated to Surrealism only from 1929, but he remained faithful
to his principles for his whole life, even after his separation from
the group. The magic poetics, the power of illusion, the possibility
to transform reality in such an intemperate product of the own
imagination, was what attracted Dalì. In cinema, he said:Surrealism becomes reality. Dalì’s first collaboration with Buñuel
was Un Chien Andalou, where this essays it about. Buñuel was
one of the most important actors and film directors of the XX
century. In this way they opened the door to surrealism in Paris.

The
development of the film is not chronologic: in the form the film was
presented and how we see it now, despite the sequence of
manipulations, e time-related sequence is almost impossible during
the projection of the film, and it’s still difficult even after the
film projection has terminated. You have a sense of disorientation,
produced by a constantly interrupted storytelling: once it has
started, it stops again, and it dissolves every causal connection,
destabilizing this connection almost immediately once we think that
we found a logic sequence in the strange actions that we see. Maybe
the film directors wanted this kind of discontinuity. However, it is
not only the missing chronologic subsequence which makes it difficult
to tell about the film, from a special point of view, ambiguity
pervades every single scene. It is hard to rethink the film due to
its fragmentariness, its variety of tone and message, the dominating
uncertainty and the sudden changes of directions in the actions and
places. It looks like that to the film directions the story of the
specific personality of the characters, only to impress who is
watching: every interpretation can be different. In reality there are
a lot of significant contents, which had been object for studies for
a long time in psychoanalysis.

The
starting scene in the film appears to be terrifying and shocking for
the spectator: a man shapes a razor, goes to the sitting woman and
with the razor he splits her eye horizontally in two parts. Of course
this was a montage art: in reality they used the eye of a dead cow.

In
the following scene the woman attends her love, but there are coming
ants out of his hand. A moment later a woman with androgyne looks is
touching an amputated hand on the ground. A man takes the hand from
the floor and put it in a box. He gives the box to her.

In
the scene after, a man and a woman are in a room. The man, who is
caught by a sort of sexual raptus, tries to approach her, but she
refuses and beats him away. But he insists and touches her breast.
She rejects him again and hits him with a sort of bundle. But he
keeps on following her, when she runs away from him, at a certain
moment you see saliva coming down from his mouth. He becomes almost
animalistic.

The
last scene is demoralizing: the main characters are buried in the
sand till their elbows, and despite they are close, and they can’t
touch each other, or they are dead.Our
imagination, and our dreams, is forever invading our memories; and
since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we
end up transforming our lies into truths. Luis Buñuel –
(2010:43).What
is exactly a surrealist film? As Elza Adamowicz states in Chien
Andalou: French Film Guide (2010:28):

It could equally well be
considered a dada film for its non-narrative elements, disjunctive
images, playful montage and irreverential parodies. Alternately –
apart from the prologue which could be bracketed off as a dream or
fantasy sequence – it could be considered as a realistic film
(contrasting with the abstraction of avantgarde cinema).

When
at the beginning of the film the cyclist falls off his bike, the
woman is looking out of the window onto the street and she sees him,
at the same height. When she watches again, she seems to live at the
4th
floor of a building because she’s looking from above. In another
scene, when the main character shoots at his doppelgänger, he falls
down, and the shooting scene starts in the same room. But then,
whilst he is falling on the ground, the room becomes a park or a
meadow, and the same woman as before appears while she is sitting
back. As he falls down, she disappears. Many people run to him and
they take him away. You might think it is a flashback, but the scene
doesn’t turn as before.

There
are some temporal and spatial sequences witch are not consistent. You
see for example ‘sixteen years ago’, ‘this spring’, but the
actions presented by the actions look like a continuation of as the
ones in the previous scenes. Even the actors appear exactly the same
and the place where they are (for example the room). The window of
the room gives first on a balcony, and later on a quiet street and
the third time on a crowded street. Every object present in the room
changes various times, for example the carriage with the dead beast
and the object that looks like a piano. The door of that room, leads
first to another room which seems to be the same one. But at the end
of the film, when she waves to the other male protagonist, the same
door leads directly to the beach. He’s at the beach, and she sees
him but in front of her own door. So the crowded street has
disappeared again.

You
have the feeling to get lost all the time because there is no spatial
coherence. As E. Adamowicz states (2010:35): continuity of action is
sometimes matched with spatial discontinuity, to undermine realism
and to destabilize fixed spatial references. For Breton ‘what we
most value in cinema, to the point of taking no interest in anything
else, was the power to disorient.’ (Hammong, 2010:73 in Adamowicz
2010:42) Disorientation, which is considered the point of departure
in everyday reality and its point of arrival in the surreal – was
considered a fundamental surrealist principle (2010:42).

Bunuel
himself states: to produce in the spectator a state which could
permit the free association of ideas, it was necessary to produce a
near traumatic shock at the very beginning; hence we began it with a
shot of an eye being very efficiently cut open’. The spectator
enters into the cathartic state necessary to accept the subsequent
events of the film. (Aranda, 1975:67, in French film guide,
(2010:43). Looking at the first scene, there are many different ways
to interpret the following scene: a man of a balcony, he is shaping a
razor, he tries its sharpness on his own fingernail, the man moves
the razor towards the woman’s eye, you see the moon again with a
few clouds passing, then de man goes again to the woman, spits the
woman’s left eye in two parts. In the past it has been interpreted
as a sexual image, a scene of death, a scene of masculine control,
castration, viewing the world in 2 different ways, looking with one
eye spit in two.

In Notes on the making of Un chien andalou (1947), Buñuel claims
that ‘NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING’, and that the
film images remain enigmatic to viewers and viewers (Mellen 1978:53
/2010:44).

Even
considering this statement, a lot of different interpretations have
been made in order to conceptualize the different characters in the
film, the way they act and the different images apparently without
any logical subsequence. For example, it’s not important in the
film to know who the protagonists are, what their name is, you only
their relationships manifested by their actions.

Bunuel
maintains that cinema is the best way to express dreams:

‘Because
of the way it works, the mechanism for producing film images is, of
all the means of human expression, the one that is most like the mind
of man or, better still, the one which best imitates the functioning
of the mind while dreaming. […] [A]s in the dream, the images
appear and disappear by means of dissolves or fades-in and -out; time
and space become flexible, contract and stretch at will,
chronological order and relative values of duration no longer
correspond to reality.’ (Hammond 2000:114 in Adamowicz, 2010:48).

The absence of logic in narration in a film is how dreams are.

Readings
that decode a text in accordance with how it was encoded, is a
dominant reading. On the other side we have oppositional readings,
which, as the words says, is in opposition of the assumptions in the
text. Negotiated reading is which lies a bit in the middle of the two
extreme readings (Benhoff-Griffin 2004). The problem with A Chien Andalou is that you don’t
know what the meant reading is, so you don’t know how to interpret.
There are a lot of different interpretations with any of them
explanations, but it’s hard to define which one is the dominant
one. This is an important aspect of surrealism.

What
is Surrealism in this film? The unreality, the disconnection between
logical and reason and illogic and perception, expressed in arts and
cinema, come alive in Surrealism. The film had a revolutionary aim as
well: it wanted to alter or even destroy oppressive ‘rules’ and
institution such as marriage, politics, religion, Church. Surrealism
was to transform the world by free expressions of dreams coming from
the subconscious, which was further developed after Freud, in daily
life would have no space.

In content I believe that the unclear
relationships between the main protagonists are important to define
the movement, spectators are not aware of the characters in the film
and the role in the film they play, lack of ability of
interpretation, it might be thought that the right consequence of
actions and their logic have been found, until the following scene
witch almost immediately disproves it. Even this is difficult to
state as many analyses have been carried out with different
interpretations of the sequence of the happenings.